Obviously, Frank Capra's greatest movie is It Happened One Night. The later Mr. Deeds is also very good, but a step towards the maudlin (that reaches its apotheosis in It's a Wonderful Life), and this, from two years after that, continues the descent. This can't entirely be blamed on Capra as it's based on a very popular play, but there's altogether too much whimsy for my liking, not to mention outright "zaniness." The reliable Jean Arthur returns from Deeds, but instead of Gary Cooper we have the first Jimmy Stewart-Capra pairing, and the two seem to bring out the worst in each other. That's not to say that it's unbearable by any means - it's thoroughly watchable and definitely has its moments, but I don't want my heart warmed as much as this film seems intent on warming it. The plot is this: cold-hearted mogul Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold) intends to corner the munitions market, what with war brewing (yes, he's a war profiteer in the making, which makes his eventual redemption all-the-more improbable), and to do so he hatches a plot to force an old friend to sell his factory by buying up all the real-estate completely surrounding it so that he can't keep it running. The only barrier to this fiendish plot is a single family who happen to own their house outright: and coincidentally (and unknown to Kirby), the granddaughter of the family patriarch Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore, ladling on the twinkly charm), Jean Arthur's Alice Sycamore, is both secretary and object of affection of his son Tony (Stewart, of course). As Kirby relies on an intermediary to do his real estate shenanigans he never meets the Vanderhofs, and it is only comparatively late in the film that Kirby realizes that it's the Vanderhofs who have been thwarting his big acquisition. But the reason the Vanderhofs can hold out is because Martin himself was a successful businessman who had an epiphany while riding up the elevator to his office one day and turned around and hasn't worked ever since. He decided to pursue what made him happy (stamp collecting - and he makes some money by appraising others' collections) and to provide a refuge for others to do the same. Consequently the whole family and attendant hangers on (one of whom Martin acquires on a visit to the real-estate man's office, in one of the more humorous scenes in the film) happily pursues their "quirky" hobbies - from dancing, to play-writing,
to candy-making, to firework testing (a key plot point). Martin (who spends the whole film on crutches - ostensibly because he was sliding down the bannisters like his granddaughters, but one wonders if Barrymore just happened to be incapacitated during the shoot) is beloved by the whole block, all of whom know they will be evicted if the last holdout sells. Meanwhile, Martin's real reason for not wanting to leave is because the house still reminds him of his beloved dead wife. Anyway, things start to unravel when Alice, who knows that Tony's snooty parents (especially his mother) disapprove of her (especially after an unfortunate event in a restaurant),
wants to invite them to a carefully orchestrated meal at the house, but Tony, who likes the crazy family and doesn't care what his parents think, tell his parents the wrong day, and they show up and see the house in full craziness. After a final indignity of Kirby senior being thrown by Alice's sister's particularly eccentric Russian dance instructor,
the Kirbys are on the way out (and Alice is furious with Tony) when the cops raid (it would take too long to explain, but they think the house is a hotbed of radicals) and accidentally set off all the fireworks in the basement. Only when the whole Vanderhof and Kirby clans are in the drunk tank does the penny drop of who's who. Martin briefly loses his temper with Kirby senior and tells him exactly what he is, only to regret it immediately and slip a harmonica in his pocket to make up for it. After a - you guessed it - heartwarming courtroom scene (where, in a precursor to the famous money scene in Life, all the Vanderhof friends have a whip-round) - things look like they're unraveling, because Alice goes into hiding out of town because she's so angry at Tony, making the rest of the family miserable, to the extent that Martin thinks he has to sell the house and move nearer her. Kirby's plot is completed, causing his rival's factory to fail and his rival to collapse dead of a heart attack, shortly after warning Kirby how he will die hated.
How will everything resolve? You can probably guess that it's going to involve that harmonica...
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